Gravedigger's Cottage (7 page)

Huh-huh-huh.
Made the whole ocean sound in a conch shell seem like the honking of city traffic by comparison.

So he was quiet, and he was polite, he was no trouble and great company. He could go ages and ages without eating, he never drank except for what he could get from his veggies, and he never even tipped over and stranded himself on his back except when Walter did it just to watch. Even when that happened, I was the only one to get mad. Tank just kept on with his steady walking motion with his feet up in the air, as if he were still getting somewhere, until I turned him over and gave Walter a clap on one ear and an earful in the other ear that I can promise you hurt a lot worse. Yet Tank paid no mind, went on, on his way without ever trying to bite anybody, which would have been his right.

He was Tank, as we had hoped, but he was not indestructible. He seemed like nothing could bother him, nothing could ever get at him, but you find whenever you think that, you were wrong. You find that you had overlooked something. You find that you never really knew the whole story from the inside, and maybe you never can.

Because at some point something bothered Tank. He stopped eating. His food bowl sat there, and the vegetables went from crispy to soft, from soft to shrunk, from shrunk to decomposed. We cleaned the old stuff out and put in new crispy stuff that then also decomposed.

We let him roam around much of the time, like we did, but he got harder and harder to find. He would stay in closets, under furniture, behind the refrigerator. So many times I pulled Tank out of someplace and found him totally covered in dust bunnies, looking like some kind of very adorable mutant hybrid turtle kitten that got caught in the dryer.

But he wouldn’t eat. We tried everything. Warming him up. Cooling him down. Keeping him in his box more, letting him roam more. Bathing him. Walking him. He didn’t even take the occasional nip of a blade of grass, which he loved to do on his walks through the yard.

He wouldn’t eat. And we couldn’t force him. Some creatures you can force-feed. Ever try and force a piece of lettuce into the mouth of somebody who can suck his whole head into his body?

All I could do was watch. He shriveled. You couldn’t see him losing fat, because everything about Tank went on inside, in his shell, his house, his protection. Where nobody could see, where nobody could get to him. His protection and his fault, the same thing.

But his legs shriveled, his head looked smaller. He would be lost for days at a time, and when I found him he would have one less toenail, one less toe, one less foot. Months he lived without a bite. And other than the decaying away, you could swear that he was fine with everything. He wasn’t bothered. You would swear it.

The last time I found him, I knew it was the last time. I picked him up and dusted him off and held him to my ear. He stretched his neck, put his head in my ear.

Huh-huh-huh,
he said, like always.

This time I didn’t giggle. This time, for the first time, I decided he was trying to talk to me. He was trying to tell me things.

He had always been trying to tell me things, I decided, but I couldn’t hear his little voice. Like in
Horton Hears a Who.

I would have figured it out. We would have worked it out. I would have heard him. I would have understood him.

We just ran out of time.

I
NEVER, EVER LIKED
the nighttime, even at the best of times.

No kind of a night owl, me. Morning owl, which wouldn’t be right, I suppose. Morning sparrow? Morning dove?

I would like to be a morning cardinal, if I had my choice and if it didn’t sound a little weird. They are the most beautiful birds, the brightest, most livid vivid birds, always visible, always
there,
always special. Never seen one alone, though, I don’t think. Strictly in pairs.

Anyway, it’s not about the birds—it’s about everything else. I am suspicious about the nighttime, about the shadowiness of what and who is up and out there. Suspicious of what prefers not to be seen, which couldn’t be a good sign—not wanting to be seen. There is just so much more hope in mornings, in the breaking light rather than the retreating kind.

I lay there in my bed, in the dark, when the August dark finally decided to arrive. I lay there listening. Smelling, breathing in the scents of the house and the sea, the scent of the darkness itself, which of course has its own odor. And listening, listening.

Stupid idea, stupid thing anyway. Bonfire night. No adults. Who needed it? It was dark, it was night. Bed was the place to be. You should always be in the place to be when it is time to be there. No place like bed.

The house whistled. Darned if Dad didn’t turn out to be right about that. The house whistled when the wind blew.

Smash.
Whoa. That was a tidal wave, practically, to sound like that all the way up here. That was a wave and a half.

He wouldn’t go. He was too sensible for that, no matter how hard he wanted to seem otherwise. Walter had a good head on his shoulders despite it all. He was bluffing, to see what I would do; and now that it was clear I would do nothing, he would do the same. That’s my boy, Walter.

Oh, no. I heard a muffled thump-thumping, like feet on the carpeting, and a rustling. In the hall right between my bedroom and Walter’s. He was doing it. He was sneaking out. How could he? This was not like us. Not like me, not like him. This was not a McLuckie thing to do. Right—that was the point, he would say, not to do the McLuckie thing. Well, I didn’t care for his point.

I got to my feet, scurried across the room in my nightdress, and threw the door open.

“Hi. Sorry. Did I wake you?” Dad said.

He was there in his summer pajamas, the ones that look like a short-sleeve button-down dress shirt and matching short pants with a hedgehog pattern stamped all over. He wore
everything
we ever gave him for Father’s Day. Even gag gifts.

“No, Dad,” I said. “I was awake.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “Do you smell it? It just won’t go away. I think it’s getting stronger, and just now it was distracting me so much I couldn’t get to sleep.”

Dad was like me, not liking the night much. He turned in when we did nearly every night. As he stood there in his shorty pj’s, hunched over in sniffing posture under the mellow, bare forty-watt bulb dangling in the hallway, it made perfect sense he should be turning in as early as Walter and me. Or earlier.

“I’m not sure I do smell it, Dad.” I gave an obvious sniff to the air. I shrugged.

“Sure you do. We talked about it this afternoon. You must be just getting used to it. Which might not be a bad thing, since obviously it won’t be waking you up at night. But as the head of the house responsible for such things, I can’t ignore that some strong, powerful scent is penetrating all corners of our home without trying to get to the source of it. You remember the smell.”

I did now. And it was true—the house had a unique kind of an odor—but I figured all houses had theirs. This one was a sort of smoky damp, like wet charcoal, and it really only seemed to compete with all the other local smells when it rained hard—which it was not now doing. But the fact that Dad could smell it at all was noteworthy. And the fact that he seemed able to smell it even before I was able to smell it,
that
was altogether peculiar.

“Right. I do remember now,” I said. “Wet charcoal.”

“Right,” he said, relieved, smiling at me. “Barbecue sauce. Very sweet, and vinegar, tomato, and molasses.”

Anyway.

“But, Dad, do you really have to be hunting for it right now? Shouldn’t you just leave it until morning?”

He pointed at me like I had a clever and original thought, which is what he tended to do whenever I gently told him what to do.

“Yes,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to wake your brother at any rate, would I?”

“Certainly not,” I said.

He came to my door, grabbed my chin between index finger and thumb, and kissed me on the tip of my nose.

“Night, Vee,” he whispered.

“Night, D,” I said.

I heard Dad’s door shut downstairs just as I had gotten myself all tucked in and arranged, fluffed and settled in bed. Almost immediately, a feeling of rightness came over me; Dad in his place, Walter in his, the waves slapping more quietly in the distance, and the nighttime push of the late summer wind returning to an occasional gentle puff through the window screen. And as the feeling of right settled over, so, too, did the heaviness of sleep.

It seemed like one minute later I heard Walter’s bedroom door close and his rapid little footsteps down the stairs and out.

I spent a good long time there, up in my bed, pretending. Pretending I didn’t care. Pretending I thought he was just silly and that this was not my concern and that he could handle it himself. Pretending I was all cozy and snuggled down in my bed and sleep was there, right there, almost there, just about there, just about…

Pretending I was going to stay put and not go down to the beach after Walter.

Truth be told, it wasn’t any good long time. It was maybe twelve seconds. I was up and dressed so quick, it was like my clothes had been standing there and I just jumped into them.

I didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all—the lonely dark night on the thin breezy road that took me the few hundred yards from our house to the beach. I got instantly a kind of new respect for Walter, the way he determined to do this, planned and waited, then got out here and made his way through the darkness to the unknown by himself, alone with nothing but his ten years and no me.

He was very brave, I thought.

He was going to need it, because I was going to kill him.

If I got there. I found this walk to be about the scariest walk I ever walked.

I didn’t do this kind of thing. This kind of dark, late, lonely thing.

But I made it. And when I did, when I emerged off the road onto the sand dune wall that acted like a standing guard between the regular ordinary world and the beach world, I was yanked both ways with competing feelings of excitement and even more scaredy-catness.

It was, as advertised, a bonfire. A beautiful bonfire it was, too, once I allowed myself to settle down enough to appreciate it. It was tall, neat, and tepee shaped. Big fat sparks and embers shot straight up, like an upside-down funnel, in a perfectly orderly procession of light into the sky. Harmless and glorious and controlled all at once, as if every element knew exactly what it was supposed to do and we were not at the mercy of the chanciness of fire.

I stood there at the top of the dune, gaping like a total yokel.

And if that were not enough, there was a reception as if they had all been expecting me.

“Sylvia!” called one tall blond girl, hopping up off a log and waving at me with a big sweeping side-to-side motion like she was trying to signal a passing ship. She came running toward me then, and if she didn’t have such a warm and welcoming tone in her voice I would have run in the other direction. I considered it all the same.

“Hi,” she said, all breathless from scaling the dune. I suppose I could have met her partway instead of planting myself like a lighthouse. But I didn’t. “I’m Jennifer.”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Sylvia, which, I know, you already know.”

“I know,” Jennifer said. She tipped her head sideways, shyly. She had rounded pink cheeks, and even with just a good moon for light I could see she was blushing. Also, up close, her voice receded to a sweet, whispery trill. “You want to come down to the fire?”

“Well,” I said, like I was being coy or something. Duh, maybe I could pass it off like I was just out for a stroll, walking a nonexistent dog or something. “Sure, I guess.” Right,
sure
and
guess
contradict each other. But they fairly represented my feelings.

We walked through the sand, toward the impressive snapping light of the fire. Jennifer was barefoot, and as my sneakers had started filling with granules I pulled them off. When we reached the fire, I was surprised to realize that the whole party was a rather intimate group actually.

“Everybody, Sylvia’s here,” Jennifer said.

“Hi, Sylvia,” everybody said.

Everybody but one, that is.

“Hello, Walter,” I said firmly. I don’t know what I thought I was getting at since he had only done exactly what he’d told me he was going to do. And since I never even told him not to do it.

Still. He knew what he did. So I fixed him with a you-know-what-you-did stare.

“Hiya,” Carmine said. He hopped to his feet and came right up to me. I flinched, took a half step back. He was, of course, hugging himself furiously as he walked.

Jennifer put out a traffic cop hand. “Down, boy,” she said, “and stop hugging yourself. What did Mom tell you about that?” Then for good measure she gave him a helpful little shove back toward his seat.

“Don’t mind my brother,” Jennifer said. “He’s just confused because sometimes he thinks he’s human.”

“Ah,” I said, thinking I liked having her between me and Carmine.

In addition, there were three other girls sitting around the fire, to whom I was introduced. There was Robin, a small black-haired girl with grinning eyes who played the flute—and played it beautifully—during most of the first ten minutes I tried to talk to her. Emma, who struck me as being most like me, fair to dark hair, medium height, medium shape, medium, medium, medium…

“I know,” she said when I mentioned it. “In a way it’s good, right? Like you always have a way to measure the world. Like everyone you meet, if they are taller than you, they are tall. If they are shorter than you, they are short. It’s nice if you want to kind of blend in, but not if you want to stand out. I think, sometimes, that I am the very exact center of everything everywhere in the universe, like the hub of the wheel of everything. Don’t you feel like that?”

Oh. Oh jeez. Well, no. Not really. Not actually. Not
ever,
as a matter of fact. Oh boy, I never even considered it, being the hub of the wheel of everything. How horrifying would that be?

“God, I hope not,” I said, sounding I’m sure a little bit desperate.